You're right, but that's why SPICE has a so-called Agent that runs inside the guest and provides a neater integration (like seamless switching from client to host, ad-hoc USB passthrough, sharing the clipboard, detecting video streams (theoretically), ...) and that would be also an option for an RDP approach.
> I wonder if tools like Proxmox could use this as a more efficient alternative to VNC (which is slow and weird) or SPICE (for which there are very few non-Linux tools).
Yeah, we at Proxmox are actually evaluating such things, and we hope that IronRDP and QEMU display [0] can be part of a stack that replaces SPICE in the long term, but it will need a bit more time to see how this play out and what exact role it can play in Proxmox VE.
Another experiment is to see if we can add a more modern video encoding to QEMU, as the recently released noVNC 1.6 gained support for H.264 [1]; albeit we naturally would prefer something more open like AV1.
We would be very happy if proxmox were to adopt IronRDP. I see you've already found the work from Marc-André Lureau, he's been doing an incredible job for the IronRDP server side. He's also been working on adding QOI image codec in IronRDP with incredible results. You're welcome to pop in the IronRDP matrix channel: https://matrix.to/#/!opeocvkWZVaLDouykU:matrix.org?via=matri...
Compute overhead of H.264 encoder is non-negligible for a VM host where I want all my CPU cycles to go to user VMs. Datacenter-class Intel CPUs (Xeon) don't include H.264 encoders in hardware. QuickSync circuitry is generally limited to consumer-grade CPUs. Not to mention MPEG licensing issues.
AV1 eliminates MPEG licensing issues, but encoding in hardware is even more limited. Also, AV1 is great for encode-once use cases (e.g. YouTube) since it's heavily geared towards reducing bandwidth requirements vs. encode speed. It's workable for real-time streaming in the lowest settings, but H.264 is still better overall.
Note that this is a bit of a POV thing. For one, CPU cycles handling display also go (indirectly) to your user. And if your users gets a crisper and better picture with less bandwidth due to a modern codec then it can be also seen as win in my book.
Modern CPUs more often have the building blocks included for video encoding, and getting one of those, or a dedicated GPU, probably makes sense if the Users/VMs workload depends on graphical output.
That said, you're definitively also right that it won't be a win for every use case on every hardware, so definitively something to look at more closely, and if it really is worse than the status quo on systems without dedicate GPU and where the CPU has now HW accelleration than the status quo, which I doubt, then adding an opt-out will definitivelys make sense.
Wouldn't it also be a problem that, IIUC, a CPU only has one encoding engine, so you could only have one active stream (at full speed), in a multi-tenant scenario?
Here I'm talking about our integration, which means full audit of what's possible in a simple POC, then a more involved look to see how we can integrate it nicely in the Proxmox VE stack, from low level QEMU to the REST API and its ACL system.
We started evaluation a few weeks ago in combination with the QEMU display work, which is still experimental and was initially announced mid-January this year, so we're still at the POC stage and thus this work will be a bit more time. I did nowhere say that IronRDP will need more time.
And FWIW, without an integrated approach RDP gains you almost nothing over plain VNC if you have only the reduced interfaces and access from outside the VM, so using something like IronRDP earlier on its own would not have gained us much besides an extra component to maintain, that's why we did not checked out integration earlier.
It's an early alpha; the bigger news hidden within is our new Rust/Yew based web framework called
proxmox-yew-widget-toolkit [0], it will allow us to move away from ExtJS (where the backing company seemingly forgot that they used to be open source) and go full in on Rust in the frontend too; it really is a breath of fresh air!
Really interesting, thanks for letting us know. There hasn't been a lot of new about this (not that I've been looking that long), is there a place to follow up on these developments, a roadmap of sorts?
Edit: Misread, thought this was about the "normal" Proxmox web UI. Any plans to make that Rust based?
> is there a place to follow up on these developments, a roadmap of sorts?
For PDM there is a roadmap [0] for the new widget toolkit there isn't such a single documents, but an initial whitepaper (well simple markdown-formatted text to provide some background and examples).
For development, you can follow on the mailing lists [1] or use our public inbox interface [2] for them, yew-devel is for the web framework/widget toolkit and pdn-devel is for, well, PDM.
> Any plans to make that Rust based?
Spelled out, detailed and actionable plan? No. On the long-term roadmap? Yes, definitively.
Just for the record, you cannot go in my headset with that UX
[Kids who have been playing with Proxmoxx for the past decade face serious competitive threats from a new generation that will NOT recommend product$ that look like 1980s industrial control systems just because some geek tells them it doesn't require giving money to a boomer in Redmond that they never cared less about. https://youtu.be/ru3gH27Fn6E ]
Maybe try Godot and see what you can put together over the holidays! If you don't, be someone else will..
> Maybe try Godot and see what you can put together over the holidays! If you don't, be someone else will..
Godot is a game engine written in C++ and thus just not relevant for our use case, which is to have a web framework using native web technology to leverage the accessibility progress made there over the last decades and being written in Rust.
Yes, as a computer scientist with almost a half century of experience, I get your product, UX, why you made certain decisions, what made ExtJS popular, why people choose Proxmox, etc. I even get how much of an ask it is of someone who chose ExtJS back in the day to now consider shifting gears to build a 3D interactive simulation in Godot to be the new control plane for Proxmox. Your current users will be satisfied with the status quo and you have great near-term sales potential continuing to knock off the dying VM company many of us knew and once loved. [Heck, I just got a Christmas eCard from Ashwood Computer (MultiValue/PICK databases) in 2024...I'mma send 'em https://youtu.be/R-BT2yzXP8w in reply.] However, I again caution that the (massive) generation that is about to suddenly replace the current techs that you have supported for the past decade will NOT be satisfied at all with your current value-ad, which is ultimately a forms-based user interface and packaging of functionality defined by the soon dead VM company and the underlying open source projects of the Linux operating system. As far as your use of native web technology, there's Web3D and X3D if you like to remain platform agnostic (a myth because the web standards are fully controlled by the platforms), but those standards require a real financial commitment over simply downloading Godot (which has improving Web export) and building your datacenter control-panel "simulation" (because a "game" is a type of "simulation"). If you also have a worthy agenda to "use more Rust", then there are some projects on Github to use Godot from Rust too. While re-thinking, it is wise to include a basic AI-agentic interface and an embedded LLM to allow fielding natural language queries and out of band notifications on the state of the control plane.
[Also, I pasted the wrong PWEI video to support that lyric in my original comment that tried to soften the blow of my opinion of your user interface https://youtu.be/mLoQueaCLqA .. this "minimalist is so cool" website doesn't have link previews that could have caught that because it was some sort of "science project" that PG, who is also much older and yet less experienced than me, wrote to promote his use of his own Arc Lisp-DSL...sound familiar?]
Well, if that pro-NATO, pro-EU guy declared having spent no money on their campaign while their Face being plastered all over the place and other proof that someone spent money on a campaign for that person, and there's a law that spending and sources of money for elections must be made transparent then the election should be 100% nullified, just like here.
Feelings are one thing, but breaking laws like here cannot just be brushed of as some people having hurt their feelings.
What I do not really understand is why this hasn't been handled before the election, i.e., why was the candidate with seemingly zero monetary transparency even allowed to be on a ballot?
There is a lot of middle ground between "brushing it off" and cancelling a whole election and throwing the choice of millions of voters to the trash.
In Spain there are violations of campaign laws all the time (and I'm talking by major traditional parties) and they are investigated, but typically the outcome is a fine, or maybe some jail time in severe cases, not invalidating a whole nation-wide election. And I suppose it's the same elsewhere because otherwise we would see news of invalidating elections left and right. Shady campaign financing is not exactly uncommon across the world.
> There is a lot of middle ground between "brushing it off" and cancelling a whole election and throwing the choice of millions of voters to the trash.
If elections are rigged, the results cannot be accepted under any circumstances. Using shady, undeclared capital in elections amounts to cheating and invites outside influence. This is a serious issue because we entrust the governance of nations to those elected by the people.
Democracy only functions if the outcomes cannot be bought. While no system is ever 100% immune to corruption, blatant disregard for election laws cannot be taken lightly.
If irregularities occur, people can vote again. Yes, redoing elections costs time and money, but if voters still choose the same leaders after understanding how they gained power, then that's democracy in action.
For me, the line is very clear because I've seen it blurred so many times in Turkey, where I come from, and I’ve witnessed the devastating consequences.
It poisonous to say elections are “rigged” unless you can prove votes were manipulated. Otherwise you’re opening the door to wide ranging grievances to second guess election results. By your logic, the U.S. should have redone the 2020 election because U.S. intelligence agencies pressured Facebook and Twitter to suppress information that could have hurt Biden. Do you really want to open the door to claims like that?
There are a few seemingly minor details missing from the conversation above:
- his support seems to have come exclusively from externally coordinated online campaigns
- his support increased dramatically within the last 2 weeks before the election
Supporting point 1, remember that he declared zero campaign expenses and never explained how he ran his campaign
Regarding the second point, the urgency under which his campaign took off and the proximity to the elections allowed him to elude mass-media scrutiny. A lot of shady details were unveiled since he became popular, which arguably would've made him unpalatable for a lot of his voters
If you want a comparison to the US political situation, this is not your "Twitter did something shady which bumped Trump's result by 2 percentage points"
A better translation is: Chase Oliver wins the White House! (If you wonder who that guy is, Google him - that's what Romanians had to do with CG after the election night; he was on the ballot and you didn't even know it). All while declaring zero expenses. NSA and CIA suspect foreign interference. His only campaign was on TikTok. Looked eerily similar to Ukraine, Georgia (the country) and Moldova's Russian influence campaigns. He eluded TikTok's swarming detection algorithms. He was unknown until late October - the campaign started in earnest 2 weeks before Halloween. Oh, and he actually looks like RFK jr., talks like RFK jr., just didn't have the same notoriety going into the election
>Democracy only functions if the outcomes cannot be bought.
Then by definition absolutely every democratic country/society does not function, because guess what: It takes truly stupid amounts of money to win an election. Ergo, you need to buy the election.
Every single candidate and party and reform movement who have argued for removing money from democratic politics have all lost/failed without a single exception. You absolutely cannot win an election without money, without buying it.
The only saving grace is that the guy who spends the most money doesn't always win.
We can go on for years about how it's stupid you need money to win an election, how the amount of money is despicable, how the world is unfair. Whatever: We aren't living in ideal dreams, we're living in the brutally unfair and practical reality.
Yes, you need stupid amounts of money to win, and I see that as normal in capitalist countries given how significant winning is. However, there's also an obligation to disclose the funding sources so people can decide whether they agree with them.
Some may downplay the importance of this, but I see it as absolutely crucial.
The above posts presented no evidence that the candidate or his campaign spent any money on the election. Obviously someone spent money, but why should that disqualify the candidate.
Should news media companies that report positively about one candidate or negatively about another be required to file in-kind donation reports? Can we disqualify their favored candidate if they don’t?
If we statistically see that there are a lot of social media posts for or against a candidate, should we require all social media posters to file in-kind donation reports?
If poor university students with nothing more than time and access to a photocopier be required to report in-kind donations for posting flyers?
I’m sure in any election we could and would find plenty of “unreported” donations, and if the penalty was removing the offending candidate, it would be weaponized to remove candidates from competition.
There is no “fair” distribution of information. Allowing courts to interfere in elections with the assumptions that they can remedy that fairness is a recipe for tyranny and manipulation.
The only reason courts should step in is when legally established processes related to registration and casting of ballots (objective, observable processes) are not followed correctly.
I think the problem is, you man’s it black and white.
Because 100% fair and transparent is not possible, anything should be allowed.
Democracy is not just the fact that people can vote. While manipulation always happens at some level, even between 2 human beings, I believe there should be a limit for an election to be democratic.
I also believe, based on the facts being reported here, that this candidate was far ahead in terms of manipulation.
Although, in his favour, I’d say I haven’t seen a list of facts on all the manipulation the other candidates have done so far, as I’m sure it’s not nothing.
And the theory that TikTok was in on it seems unlikely, they basically burned themselves with a lot of governments with this. I mean, every single established politician in the whole world will take note that TikTok is a threat to him or her and will throw its weight behind banning TikTok.
Not really, we have a full-blown REST API that provides storage plugins for a dozen of technologies, disk management, system metrics reporting, management of LXC and QEMU (as in full-blown LXD/Incus and libvirt replacement), which alone probably is taking up a third of our code base, to provide replication, live-migration, local-storage (live-)migration, backup management, HA, good integration into our access control management including multifactor authentication, integration in to LDAP/AD or SSO like OpenID Connect, software defined storage and network integrations, our own kernel, qemu and lxc builds, and hundreds of other features. Don't even get me started on the devs required on each project to continue integration and upstream development and provide enterprise support that actually can fix problems.
In other words, wrapping QEMU or LXC to provide ones custom VM/CTs might be doable easily, but that isn't even a percent of what Proxmox VE offers you.
If a thin UI around LXC/QEMU is all one would need to be competitive with VMWare, then every web dev would be stupid to not create one as a weekend project, but reality is that there's much more required to actually provide the whole ecosystem a modern hyper-visor stack requires to even be considered for any production use case.
> Interesting thanks for sharing. Surfacing this in the UI would be great if it works well for sure.
That's on the roadmap, from the original forum post linked here:
> Q: Will other import sources be supported in the future?
> A: We plan to integrate our OVF/OVA import tools into this new stack in the future.
> Currently, integrating additional import sources is not on our roadmap, but will be re-evaluated periodically.
Definitively, and situations like the Broadcom one IMO just underline that as a company you should never ever get your core infra locked into proprietary vendors' ecosystem, as that is just waiting for getting squeezed out, which they can for the reasons you laid out.
> Your outsourced VMware-certified experts don't actually know that much about virtualization (somehow).
That should be a wake-up call to have some in-house expertise for any core infra you run, at least as a mid-sized, or bigger, company. Most projects targeting the enterprise, like Proxmox VE, provide official trainings for exactly that reason.
Yeah, that's understandable, one wants to avoid switching both, the hyper-visors that hosts core-infrastructure and the backup solution that holds all data, often even from the whole period a company needs to legally save that.
But as you saw, even the biggest backup player sees enough reason to hedge their offerings and takes Proxmox VE very seriously as alternative, the rest is a matter of time.
> A few years ago you 'reduced storage cost and complexity' by moving to VMware vSAN, now you have a SAN purchase and data migration on your task list
No, you should rather evaluate Proxmox's Ceph integration instead of getting yet another overly expensive SAN box. As ceph allows you to also run a powerful and near indestructible HCI storage, but avoids any lock-in as Ceph is FLOSS and there are many companies providing support for it and other hyper-visors that can use it.
> * The hybrid cloud solution that was implemented isn't compatible with Proxmox.
> * The ServiceNow integration for VMware works great and is saving you tons of time and money. You want to give that up?
That certainly needs more work and is part of the chicken and egg problem that backup support is (or well, was) facing, but also somewhat underlines how lock-in works.
> * Can you live without logging, reporting, and dashboards until your team gets some free time?
Proxmox VE has some integrated logging and metrics, and provides native support to send to external metrics server, we use that for all of our infra (that runs on a dozen PVE servers in various datacenters around the world) with great success and not much initial implementation effort.
So yeah, it's the ecosystem, but there are alternatives for most things and just throwing up your hands only signals to those companies that they can squeeze you much tighter.
Their stackable moderation system might actually allow one to implement this relatively easily.
Add a moderation channel per country and let clients apply them depending on location/settings.
It's naturally not perfect, but as one can just travel to other countries and get their (potentially less restricted) view or even simpler use a VPN, it's as good as basically any other such censorship measurement.
This wouldn’t still work though. If someone uploads CSAM and it’s distributed to multiple users in a jurisdiction where it’s banned (which is virtually all of them) but only hidden by the moderation filters, then Bluesky would still be in a lot of pain from distributing said material.
Also, filters which are optional on the user’s part can’t really be counted as moderation.
> There are also "infrastructure takedowns" for illegal content and network abuse, which we execute at the services layer (ie the relay).
My understanding, here, is that any app has the ability to shut down entire accounts from being able to provide content for that app. And my expectation is that states will have laws that say "operators of an app must ensure that they don't provide illegal material" - at least to the extent of CSAM. So you have state motivation for app-runners to moderate illegal content on their app, and you have app-level mechanisms for shutting down content. And while it can still be hosted on whatever relay was hosting it to start with (if that isn't the one that shut down the content), I would be surprised if sharing that content to another relay didn't give away a ton of information that a person doing illegal activities wouldn't necessarily want published. Put more simply: it's unlikely that if I have to shut down some CSAM coming from your relay, that I can't also turn that relay data over to the authorities. Meaning you have a pretty strong incentive to not actually share your CSAM content to any law-abiding apps.
So to cut all sugarcoating off, the problem isn't criminals doing knowingly criminal things. It's Japanese users disporportionately obliterating Twitter-style social media and absolutely hammering the system with bunch of risque selfies that don't look adult to Europeans and anime style arts that don't involve child in making, neither of which qualify as CSAM by local laws and therefore not understandable to offending Japanese users in context of potential legal outcomes such that it would change majority behaviors. It is simply legal as drinking at legal ages.
This Japanese flood casually nears or exceeds 50% of content by volume and is a specifically Japanese phenomenon; it does not generalize into Asian cultures or Sinosphere languages[1] - all the others are easily 1% or less or proportional relative to English. It also isn't happening with Facebook but it is with Mastodon.
To be even more frank, everyone should just set up a Japanese containment server with an isolate IdP, and get Yahoo! Japan or NTT Corp fund it, have it monetized via phone contract or something, and that could solve a huge bulk of problems with microblogging moderation. Then everyone could go back to weeding out those few of actual pedophiles, smugglers and casino spams, occasionally reinstating not-too-radical political activists.
Should "outside" users be eligible for signup with such isolate system is a separate problem, but that will be foreign crime anyway and should not bother the main branch operators that cater to the rest of the world that CAN unite.
AIUI Bluesky team has a lot of ex-Twitters, who'd fought this problem for years, so it'll be very reasonable that this architecture is good as it gets without departing from their mission(of making a locked-open global microblogging social media).
